With the new twitter features coming out lately, a new retweet and geolocation setup, twitter clients are starting to update. Tweetdeck is no exception, with a slick new 0.32 update that brings both of those, plus LinkedIn support and various other nice bits.

If you've ever been confused about some of the web service protocols and how they're different, you'll enjoy this Geek and Poke of Service Calling Made Easy defining the difference between REST and SOAP :)

Navigon owners will be happy to hear that they have submitted a significant update to the app store. Most exciting is the google map search integration, allowing you to search with familiar google maps syntax "ie: library abbotsford bc" or "esso gas near 1st and main vancouver bc" (I assume anyway) instead of going through the slightly clunky address entry system they have now.

Engadget has a video and article on Chrome OS like lightning from a USB key, with links to a torrent of the OS which can be set up to (I think) run from a USB key (with the link I mean, I know it can be set up to run off a USB key). Definitely a fun looking thing to try if you have a laptop sitting around that needs some use...

Ah, here's a site with the same download (though broken) and windows and linux install instructions.

Via reddit is a great post listing the back and forth emails between a designer and "client". Well, sort of client. Just please go and read it now. An excerpt :

If I did have a working time machine, the first thing I would do is go back four days and tell myself to read the warning on the hair removal cream packaging where it recommends not using on sensitive areas.

While it doesn't have anything to do with logos and pie charts, it's a nice sample of the humor in the emails. Just go and read it ok? :)

CollegeHumor again does a great job with their spoof of the new Twighlight movie with a fake trailer for Twilight: Three Wolf Moon. If you don't get the whole 3 Wolf Moon thing, check out the wikipedia page for the history of the meme.

The Mac based password form saver/filling known as 1Password has released 1Password 3.0. If you own it already it should be a free upgrade (depending on when you purchased it of course). They are also have put their 1Password Pro iPhone app (link goes to iTunes store) on for the low low price of free.

Ok, this is not only a lesson in why you never have a game delivered to your friend's house, but in how to keep a straight face successfully for more than 5 minutes while your buddy tries to figure out that he's being Rick-Rolled. Awesome.

An interesting blog post entitled Negative Cashback from Bing Cashback, which illustrates how, allegedly, that using the "Bing Cashback" deal isn't that good a deal at all. Basically if a site sees you coming in from Bing with the cashback bonus, it gives you a raised price so the discount you get back actually is just a bit off an artificially raised price. Allegedly. Interesting to see if this gets any traction.

The CERN Press Release has details of the first collisions at the LHC. Turns out it didn't create a black hole, destroy the world, galaxy, or universe, which is a good sign. Instead it did a bunch of.... uhm... sciency stuff that you should read the press release or the slashdot story for. Again, world not destroyed, no black holes either.

Found out on TWIT this week that Audible.com is having a thanksgiving giveaway of a free audiobook (no credit card required, but an account is needed) and the selection is pretty good, not just crap ones. Hey, free is free!

Being that the New jailbroken iPhone worm is malicious, it's another reminder to people who have jailbroken phones that if you can ssh into the phone with username root and password of 'alpine', you really want to change the password, cause everyone knows what it is already.

Data Robotics, Inc. just released two new Drobo units (and right after I bought myself a cheap-ass little NAS to backup my existing version 1 Drobo too!).

The first is the Drobo Elite (press release) for a pricey $3499 USD. They claim this unit has the fastest throughput of any Drobo unit, and is aimed clearly at the SAN market, and has been tested with VMware and has some better volume management technology. The other tick list items are:

No headache dual-disk redundancy

Multi-host connectivity with LUN affinity

Best-in-class performance

Up to 8 disks of instant expansion to 16TB and Beyond

Dual high-speed iSCSI interfaces

Virtues of Smart Volumes™ - supports up to 255 Smart Volumes

Simplify your VMware environment

Secondly is the Drobo S (press release) for $799 USD. This gives you what looks like the "normal" drobo unit, but with an extra drive tacked on (total of 5) and you can choose (and change on the fly) if you want single or double disk redundancy (ability to lose one or two drives).

Multiple interfaces: eSATA, FireWire 800, USB 2.0

Up to 5 drives of instant capacity expansion to 10TB and Beyond

Protection from up to two hard drive failures

BeyondRAID self-managing and self-healing technology

Works with Windows, Mac, or Linux

The "S" doesn't look all that bad, but not a huge significant jump over the previous Drobo, with the exception of the eStata interface, which will make things nice and fast for access. I'm not even going to look at the "Elite", but then again, it's not aimed at me as a user.

I didn't expect it to be good, but the The Twilight Saga: New Moon review by Roger Ebert leaves no question as to the horribleness of this movie, and has some great lines in it.

The characters in this movie should be arrested for loitering with intent to moan. Never have teenagers been in greater need of a jump-start. Granted some of them are more than 100 years old, but still: their charisma is by Madame Tussaud.
[...]
sitting through this experience is like driving a tractor in low gear though a sullen sea of Brylcreem.

At PDC this year Microsoft revealed an early look at IE9, what it's targeting, and what the plans are to come. The theory is that IE9 will ship sometime next year, possibly corresponding with Windows 7 SP1.

Basically Microsoft is going to concentrate on web standards, javascript engine speed, and most interesting, rendering using the computers GPU instead of CPU to speed up rendering.

I'm glad they're finally going to concentrate on web standards as well. Please don't give me the "but HTML5 and CSS3 aren't finished standards and Microsoft will support them when they're ratified" argument. The other major browsers out there support these, get 100% on the ACID 3 test (well, Firefox actually only gets 93/100, still a far sight above the 33/100 that IE8 gets), and when people are writing web apps and cool tech with these standards in mind, IE users get left out in the cold, which isn't good for anyone.

Here's my main complaint with IE. Other than the security issue's it's had in the past, the UI is too slow. Not the rendering speed mind you, the UI. IE's rendering speed is, within reason, completely irrelevant. A 10th of a second difference in rendering msn.com (ugh, what a horrible page by the way), or apple.com or whatever, hell, a 5 second difference really doesn't matter all that much. But when it takes me the count of five to open a new tab in the last updated version of IE on my dual core Windows 7 system, compared to almost instantly in Chrome or Firefox, that's where the failure is. I wish I knew what it was, it's not that silly "automatically detect proxy settings" setting, but it's consistant across the different computers I use.

I think that if Microsoft has the resources to do magic stuff like rendering webpages in the Graphics Processing Unit of my computer, they sure as hell should be able to make the "new tab" function happen in a second or less.

I think that even the IE apologists will acknowledge that some of the UI in IE is sub-optimal compared to other browsers out there. Even if the rendering engines and security were apples-to-apples the same, the responsiveness of Google Chrome and Firefox win out.

I'm of two minds about this story about Steve Jobs' Personal, Terse Reply to an Apple Developer. On one hand, big companies that create an eco-system around themselves of small developers creating great software, and then slapping them down for legal stuff, pisses me right off. Remember the debacle a few years ago with Mike Rowe vs. Microsoft? See it here if you don't.

On the other hand, Jobs' reply (which is both awesome and horrible IMHO), is true, and looking at the product page, it looks like his suggestion has already been done, and other than a no doubt feverish night rebuilding software and resource strings, no harm no foul. Still a crappy thing to do to a small company though.

The Google Chrome OS announcement is under an hour away,(10AM PST). Are you ready? Gearlog will Live Blog going, and Google will be streaming it (realplayer is an option? Really?!). Anyone else know of any sites covering it Apple Keynote style?

Anyway, looking forward to it, though I expect to be disappointed. Fingers crossed :)

If you do get it, just be careful about creating or editing documents in it, to make sure you don't end up with a bunch of word docs you can't open anymore because they were created with a beta or RC :)

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, are they abandoning the cross platform goodness of Adobe AIR (which incidentally announced AIR 2.0 beta this morning) and abandoning their Mac and Linux users? True, native apps are better than AIR/Java/etc apps, but both Seesmic and Tweetdeck were actually excellent apps for being non-native. Also I wonder what prompted the move. Being touted at PDC is a pretty big deal, I'm wondering if MS is looking to jump into the "social network" world and is going to use Seesmic as their champion?

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how this pans out, and if the move is beneficial to them.

CIO.com.au has a feature on the as-yet-unreleased (but to be released in 2010) KDE 4.4. KDE took some critique when it released version 4.0 a few years back and basically called it a beta. Well, it's gotten much better since then, and the new 4.4 has some very interesting looking stuff coming to it.

Well, as predicted when The Pirate Bay was first "bought" by a gaming company a while back (and I only put that in "air quotes" because there seems to have been some dispute about stock fraud, etc in the deal) it's as good as dead. Slashdot notes that it's Tracker has shut down and switched To Distributed Hash Table.

Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living.

9-5 Mac brings us the video from the Microsoft Store and the attempts to do a spontaneous "improve anywhere" like dance in the middle of the store.

Remember yesterday I said that they were trying too hard with the Dolly Parton IE8 thing? I think I spoke too soon...

That said they should be commended for convincing (ordering?) their staff to do it and have them all (mostly) show enthusiasm, I can only assume that Bill Gates himself had their families tied up at gunpoint though (I keed, I keed)...

Probably the best part of the whole thing is the "more info" button on the youtube page, which is either a masterful stroke of sarcasm, an unabashed Microsoft shill, or someone completely deluded.

The Blackeyed Peas compel the employees at the Microsoft Store in Mission Viejo, California to break out in dance, let their hair down and have some fun. [...]

For those of you who do your Ruby on Rails coding in an IDE, you'll be no doubt excited that JetBrains RubyMine is 2.0. Rubymine is a very cool app which I've been experimenting with for some of my projects. Very reasonably priced, and very complete if you read through the docs and check out the screencasts.

9-5 Mac presented Dolly Parton endorsing IE 8 without comment. I however, will comment, and say that Microsoft really seems to mis-understand their market (or needs to have a serious talk with their marketing company) if they think that this is the sort of thing that doesn't make them look like fools.

Great video demo of the ioSafe Torture Test and Recovery. The ioSafe is a 2Tb water and heat proof hard drive enclosure. More info here. Even if you don't care about the unit, there's flames and destruction involved!

I feel bad for not posting this yet. The comic "Kick-Ass" sucked me right in, and I'm not a comic guy at all, so I'm really excited to see that the Kick-Ass Teaser Trailer looks like it'll live up to the source material, and by all accounts, the movie doesn't compromise on the violence, swearing, and bloodshed. Also check out the movie poster.

I don't normally put up stuff about contests here, but hey, Chase Jarvis is the man when it comes to great photography and he blogged about how you can get $100,000 in 140 Seconds through a Nikon sponsored contest showing your day, through your lens (literally and figuratively) in 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Pretty cool idea. Sample videos from both him and Rainn Wilson (from The Office) on the link.

No matter where you are or what you are up to today, hopefully you'll have time to sit back and give thanks to those who gave their lives to keep the current freedom that we enjoy in the world today. For me it was my grandfathers, from different sides of World War II, living in completely different worlds, but both of whom fought in their own way. One I ended up knowing, one I only heard about in stories from my dad. Peter, I wish I could have met you to thank you.

And of course, in UFies.org semi-tradition.

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Definitely a sign of the world we live in, the twitter account @shitmydadsays has been picked up as a sitcom. I'm not sure if this is really that outside of the standard sitcom formula of "family with crank old man dad character", but the fact they attribute something to twitter is interesting.

Course, it could also be the whole thing is a scam and the twitter account was setup when the show was quietly created. The account has only been active since August 3rd, and somehow 73 tweets in three months isn't something that I could see a high powered TV exec picking up, but hey, stranger things have happened.

InstinctTech DogFighter CudaDemo is a great look at the latest in GPU and video card technology, with the ability to have 4000+ planes (plus hit detection and flocking behaviors) on screen at the same time. Lies, damn lies and tech demos and all that, still pretty impressive though!

Some awesome videos and pictures of Kevin Richardson and his Lions. They really act with their human the same way my cats act with me, just that they are a weeeee bit bigger. Course, I still wouldn't be surprised if some day you hear that this guy mysteriously disappeared and only a toe was ever found. Still, immensely cute :)

I'm sure you'll be getting lots of emails on the subject as Lionsgate is cranking out Screenings like gang busters but I just came from one and hot damn, what a flick. I never read the comic but this movie was a great fun incredibly violent ride.

If you're a geek and haven't heard about the Kick-Ass movie yet, this is something to keep on your radar. If you haven't read the Kick-Ass comic yet, do. There are only 7 issues out so far, and speaking as someone who is not a comic book guy at all, I read and consumed the first 6 like a madman, and will be grabbing the 7th today.

Personally I've had no issues with it, so far anyway. There are a couple of minor issues, neither of which I don't think is related to the distro. One is my hard drive seems to be having some errors, but smartctl says there are none, and the other was it took some magic when I swapped video cards, trading an nVidia for an ATI. I documented how to do this here though.

The Google Blog noted today their release of a Dashboard! From their entry:

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings.

Seems to work nicely, and nice to have the control over what they have on you. Glad they are answering some of the privacy concerns that have been raised lately of "google knows too much about me".

Sadly Google still hasn't got up to date imager or maps for the new Golden Ears Bridge, even though you can see in Street View that the street view car clearly drove over it (hit your up arrow twice and see how the street view jumps to the top of the bridge and then back down). Bing maps at least have half the bridge....

OMG actual Linux news? From OMG Ubuntu, an excellent site I discovered recently, it sounds like Gnome 3.0 Will Be Delayed Until September 2010 simply because of the state of the project (beta quality) and the GNOME release timetable. Personally I'd rather wait and get something good instead of having something unstable. Course, I'd also like to have the new GNOME 3.0 shell to play with, cause it looks like this'll make GNOME take a revolutionary step forward instead of the evolutionary ones that the last few 2.x releases have been.

Davey Winder says that 80 percent of viruses love Windows 7, and that a Windows 7 machine without AV software on it gobbled up viruses like a fat kid gobbles up candy on Halloween. Now this was a bit of an unfair test, not installing AV software, but still, the "we're making Windows more secure" mantra has been going at MS for a while now, you'd think that this would be better.

The big issue with getting a jailbroken/unlocked iPhone recently is that all the carrier unlocks weren't working for phones with firmware 3.1 on it, as that updated the baseband firmware to such a state that the normal unlock (different than the Jailbreak) couldn't unlock it. Well, turns out today is a sn0wday, with the jailbrak and unlock combined in once nice package. Link has details, also check out http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com for the announcement and features.

Dive Into Mark has a great look at Why do we have an IMG element? and traces its origins back to the original proposal, manages to fit in the history of more than a couple of browsers, and ties it all up nicely with a look at the state of the HTTP/HTML/Browser world today.

Some of the operating systems from 1993 still exist, but none of them are relevant to the modern web. Most people today who "experience" the web do so on a PC running Windows 2000 or later, a Mac running Mac OS X, a PC running some flavor of Linux, or a handheld device like an iPhone. In 1993, Windows was at version 3.1 (and competing with OS/2), Macs were running System 7, and Linux was distributed via Usenet. (Want to have some fun? Find a graybeard and whisper "Trumpet Winsock" or "MacPPP.")

As a note, I shudder thinking about Trumpet Winsock..... not sure if those are shudders of reminiscing joy, or repressed fear. Definitely makes me glad things have moved on!

End result is that most of the time, DRM and anti-piracy measures will affect more paying customers than it will pirates. Pirates have had a fully activated, WGA passing Windows 7 ISO since before the release date, and if you want pretty much any song by any band in lossless quality it's no more than a few clicks away, and pirates will pretty much never butt up against copy protected music, game ISO DRM, or Windows Genuine Advantage-esque protection. Sadly now that they've started using these, it'll be really hard to pull them out and save face, so now it's just another software arms race of corporations vs crackers.